This is the first of three articles that desires to explore the ethnic strife in Srilanka and the country's efforts at white-washing a military sponsored genocide.
The proposed biopic of Srilankan Tamil cricketer Muthiah Muralidaran had recently faced stiff opposition from Tamil Nationalist groups in India. If one desires to understand the issue beyond the mere farce of artistic freedom, at least a rudimentary understanding of the ethnic struggle that ripped the island is important.
Tamils in Srilanka are majorly classified into two groups. One is the Eelam people of the North and East, whose ancestral roots trace back to the island since pre-historic times. The other group is the Hill-Country Tamils (or plantation Tamils) who were uprooted from Tamil Nadu (India) by the British for cultivating tea in the hills of south-central Srilanka. Thus, while both groups have a sizable and comparable population, their regions are separated by Sinhalese territory. Also, the division between them was more than just geographical. To begin with, during the Lankan independence in 1948, the Eelam Tamils had a traditional continuity to land and wealth. They even got a decent share in the political pie in the initial days after independence. On the contrary, the Hill-country Tamils were mostly poor plantation laborers who were working in abysmal conditions with little economic or political options. More notably, the plantation Tamils remained stateless for about 25 years since 1948, as they weren't given Lankan citizenship after the country's independence. It was only after an agreement by Indira Gandhi in 1974 that half of the Hill-Country Tamil population were repatriated to India and the rest were accorded Lankan citizenship. As a natural course in this evolution, except for the opposition to Sinhalese oppression, the political aspirations of the Eelam Tamils and plantation Tamils were very different.
With the rise of Solomon Bandaranayake in the Sinhalese political landscape in the 1950s, the Srilankan state started to increasingly adopt a majoritarian Sinhala-Buddhist polity. A string of discriminatory laws and anti-Tamil pogroms in the 1960s lead the Eelam Tamils to resorted to an armed struggle for a separate Tamil homeland within the island. Thus, the protracted 40 year civil war began. Eventually, the LTTE under the charismatic leadership of Velupillai Prabakaran emerged as the sole representative of the Tamil nation. By the late 1990s, they had established a fairly independent state that controlled 75% of the traditional homeland of the Eelam Tamils. In the meantime, the Hill-country Tamils had their own struggles for cultural self-determination and better wages from the state that now controlled the plantations. They were also easier prey to the southern Sinhalese mobs that targeted them for any assault that the state received from the Eelam rebels. Considering the complexity of their own problems, the Eelam Tamil masses also did not fully empathize with the plight of plantation Tamils. The LTTE leadership nonetheless did take some steps to bargain a political solution for the Hill-Country from the Srilankan state, an aspect that was visible during the Norway brokered peace talks during the 2002 truce. Notably, a significant percentage of the Hill-Country youth did see the LTTE's success in the north as a solution to their woes and some also did join the LTTE ranks.
After decades of fighting, the catastrophic civil war ended in 2009 with the complete decimation of LTTE's military apparatus. The diplomatic efforts of the Lankan government under Mahinda Rajapaksha to paint LTTE as the part of the problem did help in securing an overwhelming international approval during the combat. Nonetheless, the gross military abuses during the final phases of the war were way too obvious for human-rights organizations to ignore. The UN mission in Lanka estimated that anywhere between 40 thousand to 180 thousand Tamil civilians were killed during the final phases, when declared no-fire zones were indiscriminately shelled by aerial bombardment. The civilian death was in addition to the many rebel combatants who disappeared without a trace after having surrendered to the military. The Eelam Tamil diaspora and Tamil organizations within India have been vociferous in trying to establish the genocidal nature of the massacres carried out by the Lankan military in 2009. As one would expect, the government has been squarely blaming the LTTE for the huge death toll in the final battles. It has also been steadfast in denying any wrong on the Lankan military's part and has refused any meaningful investigation into the same. Post the war, despite numerous restrictions, the Tamils within Srilanka have been holding protests and candle light vigils for their departed, but they currently have little political leverage within the Lankan polity, which has only become more majoritarian. Srilanka continues to be a unitary state with an all powerful central government that sees decentralization and any ethno-regional aspirations as a threat.
A lot of civilian land seized by the Lankan government in the north during the war is yet to be returned to the people. The militarization of Tamil regions is still high and Sinhalese settlements are being systematically promoted in the north. There is a clearly targeted effort to alter the demography of the region and dent the possibility of any future Tamil consolidation and claim over the region. For their part, the plantation Tamils have been intermittently protesting for a wage increment from their current paltry earnings of 600 Srilankan Rupees per day (INR 320). Their educational parameters and health metrics lag the rest of Srilanka by a huge margin and there seems to be little state sponsored effort to better their lives. If the LTTE were indeed part of the problem that the Tamils faced, the post-LTTE scene looks gloomier for them.
In the 1990s, it is in these racially stifling situation for Tamils that a Tamil from the Hill-country region 'Muthaiah Muralidharan' rose through the ranks to emerge as one of Srilanka's most celebrated cricketers. While the natural inclination would be to celebrate his outstanding achievements, there is more to his case than just his on-field performance. The reason for Muralidharan's low popularity among Tamils (both plantation and Eelam Tamils) has a lot to do with how he had modeled his rise to fame. We shall discuss the same in a subsequent article.
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